


intermission

by quadrille



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Domesticity, Friends to Lovers, Implied Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Multi, Outer Space, Polyamory, Post-Season/Series 04, Pre-Season/Series 05, Season/Series 04 Spoilers, Space Stations, Survival, The Ark Station
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 13:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14403318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrille/pseuds/quadrille
Summary: The Ark was always a fragile ecosystem, a tin can in space, but they’ve never been more aware of it than now: seven youths trying to run an entire station on their own, breathing new life into its empty echoing hallways.(or, growing closer & killing time for six years & seven days. Spoilers for the S4 finale. Set between S4-S5.)





	intermission

The first two months back on the Ark are spent trying not to starve to death.

Slowly starving, and hoping the oxygenator won’t break, and obsessively monitoring life support systems and CO2 levels and the state of the algae farms and keeping their caloric expenditure low. The seven of them chew on bland MREs which taste like dust on their tongue — scavenging the abandoned living quarters dredges up a few forgotten spice packets and protein bars, which makes it a little better, but they can still feel their bodies withering and turning inwards, chewing on fat and muscle and tendons. Murphy’s cheekbones turn even more gaunt; Monty develops hollows under his eyes; Raven’s leg aches more than ever before, and though she doesn’t say anything about it, Bellamy searches cabinets and drawers for painkillers for her.

Mostly, they try not to move.

There’s the occasional panicked excursion, like when a fire breaks out in engineering and they have to fumble for the portable extinguisher with numb fingers, run until they’re gasping for breath, douse it before their delicate home falls apart. Three of the solar panels break, debris bouncing off with a deep hollow thud, and Raven sends herself out on a space-walk to repair them. The Ark was always a fragile ecosystem, a tin can in space, but they’ve never been more aware of it than now: seven youths trying to run an entire station on their own, breathing new life into its empty echoing hallways.

  


> THE ALGAE FARM
> 
> Their small farm isn’t as complex or robust as Farm Station was, but Monty makes do with these limited tools. When the algae first blooms under his keen attention, and they serve up a seaweed salad, it’s like he lets out a breath for the first time since they got up here. They all laugh, cheer, toast each other with restilled water. That initial bite tastes like fucking heaven.
> 
> After their food reaches a sustainable level, Murphy, of course, immediately starts trying to find a way to distil it into moonshine. After a while, Monty decides to help out — and if he’s remembering similar past experiments with Jasper, Harper’s the only one he tells.

 

The next three months are settling into a routine, a group of people doing their best to while away the time. The couples visibly stick together, but everyone still comes together for communal meals (each one still feels like a triumph). Their group has sealed off obsolete sections of the Go-Sci Ring until their horizon shrinks down to something manageable, feeling less like they’re walking around in a graveyard or haunted house, amongst the bones of everyone that came before.

  


> ARK STATION MEDICAL
> 
> Since they don’t have a real medic anymore and he’s absolutely fucking useless at anything except filthy opportunism, John Murphy decides to become a doctor.
> 
> Or, at least: their closest thing to it. He spends hours in the empty guts of Medical, propped in a chair and legs stretched out on the table, flipping boredly through a textbook. It’s the same med bay that his father burgled once, and he memorises the names of medications until they blur in front of his eyes.

  


They’re all part of the Ring now, divisions flattened until there’s no difference between Skaikru and Grounder, or the former prestige of Alpha Station versus the grubby jumpsuits of Factory Station. Wandering these hallways, Bellamy can barely even remember what it felt like to care about such bullshit categories. They’re meaningless now. There’s no use driving a wedge between each other when they’re all on the same team.

Still, they risk going flat-out insane with just the handful of them roaming this ghost town, and so they find ways to keep busy. One of the station administrators had an excellent entertainment catalogue, which they sift through for movie nights. Bellamy picks through Jaha’s library and rereads old classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Odyssey, a long road home. Raven tinkers with their life-support systems and equipment and builds more EVA suits; plus, after so many years of repairing scrap into something salvageable, it turns out that Emori has a genuine yen for engineering, and joins her. (Echo watches them both mistrustfully, ill-at-ease with this technology.) Meanwhile, Bellamy exorcises his energy in the on-board gym, rebuilding muscles that atrophied during their near-starvation — Harper joins him, limbs initially shaky from radiation sickness, but over the months she slowly regains her strength and remembers what it was like to be on his security team.

 

> EARTH MONITORING STATION
> 
> A long wall of glassy empty screens stretching across the room, some of them cracked, all of them showing nothing. Once upon a time, these displayed the vitals and statistics for each of the Hundred.
> 
> They’re all long-gone, the Ark’s monitoring systems now blind.

  
  
And through it all, Bellamy is too-aware of the nights when Monty and Harper sit entangled with each other on the sofa, or Emori whispers something in Murphy’s ear with a shared laugh at some inside joke. The other half of their group purse their lips, and try not to think too much about what they’re missing.

This only lasts for a while.

When Raven shows up at Bellamy’s room with a rap of her knuckles against the doorjamb, it feels inevitable — they’ve been here before, after all, harmlessly blowing off steam. Except this time her expression is rueful rather than annoyed, and it’s the first time since Wick that she’s finally had enough downtime to feel that nagging sense of desire again, or a willingness to let someone else see her naked again.

So, she leans against his doorway and hopes to god she hasn’t made a massive mistake. But sprawled on his bed with a book propped against his knee, Bellamy raises an eyebrow at her.  “Well, this feels a little familiar. You sure about this?”

“My libido’s low, but it’s not _nonexistent,_ Bellamy.” It’s going to be five years. Five whole damn years. That’s a long time to be lonely.

“Starting to suspect I’m nothing but a warm body for you to take advantage of whenever you’re feeling antsy.”

“You know that’s not true,” she says softly.

“Yeah, I know.”  He pauses, then tosses the book aside.

In the end it’s the easiest thing in the world to fall into bed together, with Bellamy kicking the door shut and Raven tugging at his ragged belt, the frayed leather slithering through its loops, the two of them falling backwards onto the cot in the room he’s chosen for his own. She hisses slightly in pain at the collision, and he moves accommodatingly, to take on more of their weight himself.

In the next few weeks, as they keep drifting to each others’ quarters after hours, she never asks if it means anything more to him — and besides, she doesn’t need it to, either. Raven takes care of all her necessities neat and businesslike, fulfilling a need for intimacy like one might address the usual hunger, thirst. Besides, she sees the way Bellamy stands at the old chancellor’s window every morning, whenever the Ark rotates enough to look down at the burning corpse of North America; she notes that crease in his brow and how his expression seems to shutter closed. A part of him died when Clarke Griffin did. She’s not trying to fill that place, either; probably no one can, but it’s just enough to be here, to have some company against the chill nights and the failing heating systems and the boredom, with a man she realises she’s starting to consider her best friend.

“At least Octavia’s safe in the bunker,” Raven points out one night, her chin resting against his shoulder, her wounded leg splayed across the bed.

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, and tries not to think about how every single goddamn time they thought that was the case, it wasn’t. 

Time marches on.

Echo joins them all in their hobbies, cautiously, like a wary cat: she starts helping Raven and Emori in engineering to learn how these foreign machines work, and she joins Harper and Bellamy in the gym. They find some poles to practice with and she tries to keep her sword skills sharp, and teaches them to the others; there’s no real reason to hone their grounder combat skills, but hey, you never know. The fighting style doesn’t come naturally to Bellamy — O was the dancer of the two siblings, and he was always better at marksmanship than melee — but he gives it his best shot.

And, yes, she eventually joins _them_ , too: Bellamy first notices it in the way that Raven’s hand settles on the small of the other woman’s back, or gives her a playful nudge with her good knee. _Is it okay if she joins us?_ Raven asks him one night, and he almost laughs, thinking back to two girls warming his tent in the Hundred’s camp, roughly two years and an entire lifetime ago. Before anyone of them knew what they were doing, or what was about to come down on their heads. A simpler time.

_Whatever the hell we want,_ he says, and he means it.


End file.
